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Samuel Green was an slave, freedman, and minister of religion. A conductor of the Underground Railroad, he was tried and convicted in 1857 of possessing a copy of the anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe following the Dover Eight incident. He received a ten-year sentence, and was pardoned by the Governor of Maryland Augustus Bradford in 1862, after he served five years.
Thomas Garrett was an American abolitionist and leader in the Underground Railroad movement before the American Civil War. For his fight against slavery, he was subject to threats, harassment and assaults. A $10,000 bounty was established for his capture, He was arrested and convicted in the Hawkins case. Over his life, he helped more than 2,500 African Americans escape slavery.
John Hunn was an American businessman and politician from Camden, Kent County, Delaware. The first governor elected after a reform of Delaware's state constitution and a compromise candidate, Hunn served from 1901 until 1905 and became the first of a multi-decade string of elected Republican Delaware governors.
John Hunn was an American farmer and abolitionist who was a "station master" of the Underground Railroad in Delaware, the southernmost stationmaster and responsible for slaves escaping up the Delmarva Peninsula.
Samuel D. Burris was a member of the Underground Railroad. He had a family, who he moved to Philadelphia for safety and traveled into Maryland and Delaware to guide freedom seekers north along the Underground Railroad to Pennsylvania.
Mary Edmonson (1832–1853) and Emily Edmonson (1835–1895), "two respectable young women of light complexion", were African Americans who became celebrities in the United States abolitionist movement after gaining their freedom from slavery. On April 15, 1848, they were among the 77 slaves who tried to escape from Washington, DC on the schooner The Pearl to sail up the Chesapeake Bay to freedom in New Jersey.
The history of slavery in Kentucky dates from the earliest permanent European settlements in the state, until the end of the Civil War. Kentucky was classified as the Upper South or a border state, and enslaved African Americans represented 24% by 1830, but declined to 19.5% by 1860 on the eve of the Civil War. The majority of slaves in Kentucky were concentrated in the cities of Louisville and Lexington, in the fertile Bluegrass Region as well the Jackson Purchase, both the largest hemp- and tobacco-producing areas in the state. In addition, many slaves lived in the Ohio River counties where they were most often used in skilled trades or as house servants. Few slaves lived in the mountainous regions of eastern and southeastern Kentucky. Those slaves that were held in eastern and southeastern Kentucky served primarily as artisans and service workers in towns.
Slavery in Maryland lasted over 200 years, from its beginnings in 1642 when the first Africans were brought as slaves to St. Mary's City, to its end after the Civil War. While Maryland developed similarly to neighboring Virginia, slavery declined here as an institution earlier, and it had the largest free black population by 1860 of any state. The early settlements and population centers of the province tended to cluster around the rivers and other waterways that empty into the Chesapeake Bay. Maryland planters cultivated tobacco as the chief commodity crop, as the market was strong in Europe. Tobacco was labor-intensive in both cultivation and processing, and planters struggled to manage workers as tobacco prices declined in the late 17th century, even as farms became larger and more efficient. At first, indentured servants from England supplied much of the necessary labor but, as their economy improved at home, fewer made passage to the colonies. Maryland colonists turned to importing indentured and enslaved Africans to satisfy the labor demand.
Slavery in Virginia began with the enslavement of Native Americans, during the early days of the English Colony of Virginia and through the late eighteenth century. They primarily worked in tobacco fields. Africans were first brought to Colonial Virginia in 1619, when 20 Africans from present-day Angola arrived in Virginia on the ship The White Lion. About that time, Native Americans were also captured and enslaved.
The New Castle Court House Museum is the center of a circle with a 12-mile radius that defines most of the border between the states of Delaware and Pennsylvania and parts of the borders between Delaware and New Jersey and Maryland.
The treatment of enslaved people in the United States varied by time and place, but was generally brutal, especially on plantations. Whipping and rape were routine, but usually not in front of white outsiders, or even the plantation owner's family. An enslaved person could not be a witness against a white; enslaved people were sometimes required to whip other enslaved people, even family members. There were also businesses to which a slave owner could turn over the whipping. Families were often split up by the sale of one or more members, usually never to see or hear of each other again. There were some relatively enlightened slave owners—Nat Turner said his master was kind—but not on large plantations. Only a small minority of enslaved people received anything resembling decent treatment; one contemporary estimate was 10%, not without noting that the ones well treated desired freedom just as much as those poorly treated. Good treatment could vanish upon the death of an owner. As put by William T. Allan, a slaveowner's abolitionist son who could not safely return to Alabama, "cruelty was the rule, and kindness the exception".
James Booth Jr. was the Chief Justice of what later became the Delaware Supreme Court from 1841 until his death in 1855.
Harriet Tubman's family includes her birth family; her two husbands, John Tubman and Nelson Davis; and her adopted daughter Gertie Davis.
The Dover Eight refers to a group of eight blacks who escaped their slaveholders of the Bucktown, Maryland area around March 8, 1857. They made it north to Dover, Delaware where they were turned in by Thomas Otwell and lured to the Dover jail with the intention of getting the $3,000 reward for the eight men. The Dover Eight escaped the jail and made it to Canada. They were helped along the way by a number of people on the Underground Railroad, except for Thomas Otwell.
William Brinkley was a conductor on the Underground Railroad who helped more than 100 people achieve freedom by traveling through the "notoriously dangerous" town of Camden north to or towards Wilmington, which was also very dangerous for runaway enslaved people. Some of his key rescues include The Tilly Escape of 1856, the Dover Eight in the spring of 1857, and the rescue of 28 people, more than half of which were children, from Dorchester County, Maryland. He had a number of pathways that he would take to various destinations, aided by his brother Nathaniel and Abraham Gibbs, other conductors on the railroad.
Isaac S. Flint was an Underground Railroad station master, lecturer, farmer, and a teacher. He saved Samuel D. Burris, a conductor on the Underground Railroad, from being sold into slavery after having been caught helping runaway enslaved people.
Ann Maria Jackson was an enslaved woman with nine children ran away from her enslaver in November 1858, after two of her eldest children had been sold away. Her husband became mentally ill and he died in a poor house. Another four of her children were threatened to be sold. She gathered the seven children who were with her and traveled along the Underground Railroad for Canada. The Jacksons established lives for themselves in Toronto. Her two eldest children reunited with the family. Her youngest, Albert Jackson, became the first African American to work as a letter carrier in Toronto. Later, the two eldest children connected with the family in Toronto.
Marriage of enslaved people in the United States was generally not legal prior to the Civil War (1861–1865). African-Americans were considered chattel legally, and they were denied human or civil rights until slavery was abolished after the Civil War and with the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. Both state and federal laws denied, or rarely defined, rights to enslaved people.
A group of 28 enslaved people from Maryland escaped their slaveholders on October 24, 1857. They were a group of two dozen enslaved men, women, and children who fled from Dorchester County, Maryland. Four men joined their group to travel north along the Underground Railroad.
References
- 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 "The People: Emeline & Sam Hawkins". Division of Historical and Cultural Affairs - State of Delaware. Retrieved 2021-06-17.
- 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 "Emeline Hawkins MSA SC 5496-15142". State of Maryland Archives. Retrieved 2021-06-17.
- 1 2 Pauly, Megan. "History Matters: Thomas Garrett's trial of 1848". www.delawarepublic.org. Retrieved 2021-06-17.
- 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 "Aboard the Underground Railroad-- Rush R. Sloane House". www.nps.gov. Retrieved 2021-06-17.
- 1 2 3 4 5 6 "Quakers & Slavery : Thomas Garrett". web.tricolib.brynmawr.edu. Retrieved 2021-06-17.
